Leonardo DiCaprio: Leading Man

With two confident, unsettling performances, the former boy wonder grows up (finally) and becomes the actor of his generation. PLUS Photos you'll see only on GQ.com

He was already a successful, cheeky, sweetfaced TV actor when Leonardo DiCaprio saw the first two film performances that really turned his head. One was James Dean's in East of Eden. The other, in Taxi Driver, was by Robert De Niro (whom the teenage DiCaprio had just been cast opposite in This Boy's Life). "I never said, 'This is what I'm going to aspire to be,' " he remembers, "because at that age, it's something that's so beyond anything that's a possibility. But certainly it was something like, 'Wow, I would love to give a performance even close to that someday.' "

Everyone significant involved with East of Eden was retired or gone, but he realized that the auteur behind Taxi Driver was very much around. From then on, the director he most wanted to work with was Martin Scorsese. When he was about 18, DiCaprio even changed his representation primarily because he believed that his new agent could get him access to a Scorsese project called Gangs of New York. For a while, nothing happened, but not long afterward he met Scorsese in a New York bar after the screening of a De Niro movie: "I was blown away that he even knew who the hell I was. He started talking to me about Bob and how Bob told him about me…" It turned out that after This Boy's Life, De Niro had advised Scorsese that this was a kid worth looking out for.

"I was dumbfounded that he'd seen anything I'd done."

DiCaprio's wish would eventually come true. And by the time Gangs of New York was finally made, years later, it was partly DiCaprio's participation and the commercial value he lent in the wake of his post_Titanic_ fame that allowed the lm to go forward. (DiCaprio got the good news while eating pad thai in Thailand, where he was filming The Beach. But even then it was delayed, and DiCaprio was ready too soon: "I started working out and bulking up to be this Irish gangster, and the movie kept getting postponed, so it was like a year and three months of having to work out, having to eat.")

Two more ScorseseDiCaprio films have followed: the Howard Hughes tale The Aviator, which DiCaprio calls "the most memorable and rewarding filmmaking experience I can recall," and the recent, electric tale of multiple deceit in Boston copsandMobland, The Departed. "The guy's a mentor to me, that's what it is," says DiCaprio, "and I'm blessed, honestly, to be in his presence when making these movies, because you cannot stop learning… It's incredible. I couldn't have hoped for anything more."

In The Departed, DiCaprio may not have the flashiest role—whenever Jack Nicholson appears, he is a whirlwind and anyone else in his vicinity does well to even remain standing—but he has a quiet assurance that allows him to channel the darker currents at the film's turbulent center. Further collaborations are under discussion, and no contemporary Scorsese interview is complete without some kind of testimony to DiCaprio and their bond: "His face is a battlefield of moral conflicts." "There's an inner story going on with DiCaprio that somehow I was able to tap into, which is similar to what I feel."

DiCaprio says he believes Scorsese still refers to him as "the kid," though not to his face.

"Thankfully," says DiCaprio, "he sees something in me that makes him want to work with me."

We talk on the patio of a suite at the Hotel BelAir in Los Angeles, where DiCaprio picks at a fruit plate and explains that he is jetlagged from a brief trip to Europe to meet with a director he won't identify about a project he won't discuss.

There's a supposedly scientific study reported in the Los Angeles Times today proving that famous people are more narcissistic than others.

"I'm sure. Isn't that the very nature… It wasn't mindblowing evidence, right I thought you were going to tell me the news about Pluto not being a planet."

No, but I'm not happy about that.

"Me neither. I'm a Scorpio—I'm supposed to be ruled by Pluto."

So you're fucked.

"I know. I'm no longer part of the Zodiac."

What does it mean you're supposed to be like

"Scorpios Passionate [snorts derisively]…driven…secretive…highly sexual…and something else. I forget. And I know what your next question's going to be. 'And how accurate do you think that is, according to who you are, sir' "

So does that seem like a vaguely reasonable summary

"Very vague, yeah. Very vaguely."

For his latest movie, Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio becomes a Zimbabwean gem smuggler hemmed in by some of life's usual hazards—greed, lust, danger, conscience—while he hunts down the one huge diamond he imagines will solve all his problems. Though it is far more than a film made simply to express a political point, Blood Diamond does attack the diamond industry in two ways. One of these ways—the diamond industry's sometime indifference to the source and human costs of the diamonds it sells (particularly those from Sierra Leone)—is presented as a matter of recent history. But the other—the suggestion that the diamond industry is a global scam based on artificially restricting supply to maintain the high prices of gems with little intrinsic value—seems more timeless, and hence more of a challenge. (It has been reported that the industry has now embarked on a marketing campaign specifically to combat and compensate for any damage caused by this movie.)

DiCaprio says that he has bought diamonds—"girlfriends, my mom"—but not recently. When I suggest that the movie portrays diamond consumers as people buying into some kind of marketing myth, he responds, "What isn't a marketing myth, at the end of the day To me, the point is to say we're all consumers." And so, he suggests, we should all be careful and responsible about everything that we buy.

I guess there is another weird kind of resonance in Blood Diamond in that this is the second movie you've made about searching for a big diamond.

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